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Good morning,

We are currently in the process of finding a way to make a WFP application self-updatable. Our application will run on many PCs (that are owned by us but they are off our network, they could be located at shopping malls, offices...etc) but we would like our application to self-update (run installers by itself with no user interaction, nobody will be there to click the "install" button).

I know that it can be done, probably with a mixture of click-once and probably a local windows service checking if there is a new version from a web site, but I would love to hear suggestions and comments about that.

Have a good day.

Jportelas
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  • StackOverflow is not about `suggestions and comments`. [Have a look at the FAQ](http://stackoverflow.com/faq#questions) – GameScripting Dec 14 '12 at 20:57

2 Answers2

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Well I have not used Clickonce but used commercial tools like Advance Installer, Installshield which do a pretty good job. If you would like to implement your own auto update, my suggestions would be: 1) Rather than a windows service (which would be an overkill imo), the checking can be done in the application itself. This can be 1) At application startup 2) Via a menu option 3) Periodic Frequency based (e.g., every 15 days).

2) The application after checking that an update is available can download it, remove the current installation and install the new version

stamhaney
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  • Thanks for the reply. Yes, after a lot of reading I've found that the best would be that, to roll our own self-update mechanism, something like this: – Jportelas Dec 14 '12 at 20:48
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Thanks for the reply. Yes, after a lot of reading I've found that the best would be that, to roll our own self-update mechanism, something like this:

a) The app checks for updates by itself, when an update is found it starts an update process (then the application terminates).

b) the update process downloads the update and the starts the new version.

I see that here there are a lot of things to consider like: security (seems like the recommended mechanism to download the files should be HTTP). Rollback (if anything fails, go back to the previous version!). Granularity (should I have updates per file or for the whole application?)...etc.

Jportelas
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